Quotes from Scott Adams

Kanye's message was that focusing on the past creates a sort of mental prison that limits your options. In the simplest form, if a white male in America has ten ways to succeed and an African-American only has eight, it isn't productive to focus on the difference. It is more productive to pick a path to success and take it.

At the time of this writing I am trying to influence another national topic: climate science. My framing involves separating the science from the prediction models, and the prediction models from the economic models, and evaluating each of them separately. After all, economics is not science. Economics is more like astrology, at least when you're predicting ten years out.

Research shows that loneliness damages the body in much the same way as aging.1, 2 It sure felt that way. Every day felt like losing a fight. I learned that loneliness isn't fixed by listening to other people talk. You can cure your loneliness only by doing the talking yourself and—most important—being heard.

Humans will always think in terms of goals. Our brains are wired that way. But goals make sense only if you also have a system that moves you in the right direction.

Good health and sufficient money are necessary for a base level of happiness, but you need to be right with your family, friends, and romantic partners to truly enjoy life. The

Never assume you understand the odds of things. I

There was only one creature smarter than all of those doctors put together: the Internet. (Yes, it's a creature, okay?) I

PERSUASION TIP 9 Display confidence (either real or faked) to improve your persuasiveness. You have to believe yourself, or at least appear as if you do, in order to get anyone else to believe.

Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason. I've

If you achieve your goal, you celebrate and feel terrific, but only until you realize you just lost the thing that gave you purpose and direction. Your options are to feel empty and useless, perhaps enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or set new goals and reenter the cycle of permanent presuccess failure.

You probably think the majority of your crabbiness is caused by the idiots and sociopaths in your life plus your inexplicable bad luck on any given day. Based on a lifetime of observation, my best estimate is that 80 percent of your mood is based on how your body feels and only 20 percent is based on your genes and your circumstances, particularly your health.

Then there's education. Do you know what the unemployment rate is for engineers? It is nearly zero. Do you know how many engineers like their jobs? Most of them do, despite what you read in Dilbert comics.

Thanks to my odd life experiences, and odder genes, I'm wired to think things will work out well for me no matter how unlikely it might seem.

I decided to revive a long-lost interest and try my hand at cartooning. But it was an unlikely dream, given my complete lack of artistic talent and the rarity of success stories in that business. So I decided to try something called affirmations, which I will describe in more detail later in the book. I bought some art supplies, practiced drawing every morning before work, and wrote my affirmation fifteen times a day: "I, Scott Adams, will be a famous cartoonist.

you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion.

My experience, as odd as it sounds, is that I can change my food preferences by thinking of my body as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, I can feel angst about every problem in the known universe, so long as those problems can be described in words or pictures.

When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank in San Francisco, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don't want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He's in business for the wrong reason. My

The reality one learns while practicing hypnosis is that we make our decisions first—for irrational reasons—and we rationalize them later as having something to do with facts and reason. If you believe humans are fundamentally rational, you will have a hard time learning to be a hypnotist because hypnotists rely on our irrational brain wiring to persuade. The most effective politicians do the same.

The directional nature of happiness is one reason it's a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Tennis

We can't travel beyond the edge of the universe without exceeding the speed of light, which is theoretically impossible. That's what you would expect in a simulation. You would have some sort of rule of physics to keep the simulated people from traveling beyond the edges. Here I'm assuming the universe is expanding at the same rate as the light that is traveling in all directions, so we can never catch up to it.

You might wince at the fact that I put economics ahead of your family, your friends, and the rest of the world, but there's a reason. If you don't get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country. Once

what hypnotists have long known, and scientists have in recent years confirmed, is that our decisions are often made without appeal to the rational parts of our brains. We literally make our decisions first and then create elaborate rationalizations for them after the fact.

But business writers will recognize Trump's strategy as what I will call the new-CEO move. Smart CEOs try to create visible victories within days of taking the job, to set the tone. It's all about the psychology.